1.

Benjamin H. Bratton - 18 Lessons of Quarantine Urbanism, Strelka (2020):

I read this article at the beginning of April when quarantine was relatively new, and I’ve come back to it a few times because Bratton’s thought are very prophetic in how he details how COVID will impact society and specifically urban space. One thing that a contagion rapidly makes apparent is the connectedness between individuals that goes down to a biological level. Bratton argues that coronavirus leads us to think in terms of an “epidemiological view of society”. This biological reality overturns the individualistic and atomised view of society forced on us by neoliberalism. Evidently, we all have a mutual responsibility for the health and well-being of others. The physical sickness of one person or group is a shared burden for everyone, and only as a collective are we able to fix it.

THE EPIDEMIOLOGICAL VIEW OF SOCIETY
Among these is an epidemiological view of society that focuses less on the individual vs. society, but on the enmeshed whole through which each of us lives. Each organism is a transmission medium for information—from ideas to viruses—and is defined by who and what each is connected to and disconnected from. With COVID-19, viral contagion is dangerous, but the risk is not just individual. It is a collective risk. The epidemiological view should shift our sense of subjectivity away from private individuation and toward public transmissibility. Emphasis shifts away from personal experience and toward responsibilities couched in the underlying biological and chemical realities that bind us. Dashboard interfaces and statistical models of contagion have become the visual profile of the event. The image of our interconnected whole seen in these reflections should stay with us, long after the crisis passes.

2.

Unrealised Performance, Tezontle Studio - (As seen in Apartamento Magazine, Issue #25, 2020)

I came across Tezontle Studio in the latest issue of Apartmento Magazine. In an interview, they talk about a speculative performance project in which the artists would live inside of Gonzalo Fonesco’s La Torre de los Vientos, a huge public sculpture in Mexico city, commissioned for the 1968 Olympics. The performance was essentially this experiment in domesticating a piece of abstract art and overtime launching a kind of homely colonisation of the space. I loved the idea of the domestic extending outside of the home and people being able to repurpose the word around them for everyday life, where it traditionally does not appear. I was thinking about this in relation to how we are adapting and domesticating public space generally because of the lockdown. My friend L was talking about how she’s being invited for evening chats with her young mum neighbours who all pull out camp chairs in the middle of the street and spend their evenings together using the road as a kind of living room. In New York, drinking alcohol in the street and in parks has always been illegal, but right now bars and restaurants are selling drinks to go and people are using the park or the side of the road as social space.

Whilst the new standard of working from home has meant that we now see our homes invaded by work, with no clear boundaries between personal life and labour, we’re also seeing the reverse happen, in that spaces that were previously professionalised, corporate, or institutional are in some way interrupted by domesticity. There’s a kind of uncanny intimacy where interactions you would previously have only really had in specific settings are now taking place in your bedroom or kitchen. Watching the news you can see MP’s dialling into parliament with their little bookcases in background. It’s also interesting how this compels a kind of curation of home space, in that your home is now a stage from which you are now performing your public life. On the one hand, you have this heightened intimacy where everyone is in their own homes, surrounded by their family or lover or pets, in sweatpants and barefoot, whilst on the other hand there is a total lack of physicality to the interaction that has the inverse effect, after you’re done talking to someone you can literally click a button and they’re no longer there.

3.

Affects of Cities, Elliott Papazahariakis (Desired Landscapes, Issue #3, 2020)

Papazahariakis’ article in Desired Landscapes talks about affect and how people experience the city. Affect, the author tells us is “that something going on”. The pleasure of living in or visiting a place is often in the intangible (though, the intangible that hinges on many concrete infrastructures, practises, and policies to exist). The author argues that the affect of a place has a kind of bodily impression—in that how we experience a place causes pre-linguistic, physical reactions. A kind of vibe.

Using Nursultan, Kazakhstan as a case study, Papazahariakis details how residents feel about their city, and how this affects their relationship with the state. He concludes that ‘feelings are not incidental to material and symbolic processes of statecraft, but are actively involved in making the state feel “real”’. There’s a revolving door between how we feel about a place and how we relate to what we imagine the place to represent. The affect that states and cities put out will be written into collective memory and dictate how we act once COVID is a distant memory.

4.

Selling Sunset (Netflix, 2020)

My last choice for this months list is Series 2 of the Netflix reality show, Selling Sunset. The show follows the professional and personal lives of a group of rich, hot real estate agents selling multi-million dollar homes in the Hollywood Hills. If you haven’t seen it before, it’s best described as a kind of Keeping up with the Kardashians meets Location, Location, Location. I watched the whole season in a sitting so I can’t actually remember which episode this is from, but there’s a scene where one of the realtors, Christine, talks about her engagement. Whilst hosting an Open House at what she describes as her “dream home”, she meets a wealthy tech entrepreneur, starts dating him, sells him the house, and moves in.

Property shows as a genre allow us these moments of vicarious living. Selling Sunset marries this with the equally beguiling world of low-tier reality stars. We’re invited into these insane California post-modernist houses with 12-car parking and wine cellars, whilst we also get to know the inner gossip of this deranged circle of friends/colleagues. What Christine is able to do through her engagement is imagine this whole life for herself which she creates from the house up. It’s like motherloading your fortune on the Sims and building an extravagant mansion as the site for your new life. It’s also this very Californian/Suburban imagination where the detached suburban house becomes the stage for life to take place, and the contours which give shape to everything about our life.

I think it’s very tempting to luxuriate in this suburban idyll at this time when space and a garden is so desirable, and when you can’t go out and meet anyone, use public transport, or gain any benefit from genuine urban spaces. I guess what I’m saying is that right now we’re all Christine, hedging our bets on a billionaire tech entrepreneur to save us with the best life we can now imagine—one of sanitised, domestic luxury.





Themes: Domesticity, Affect Theory, Working from Home, Everyday Life, Urban Planning, Quarantine, Real Estate, California, Suburbia